The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 10 by College Hill Independent

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

APR 21 2017

THE

COVER

INDY

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 10 APRIL 21 2017

Afternoon Eliza Chen

NEWS 02

Week in Review Zack Kligler, Julia Tompkins, and Jamie & Chris Packs

No Free Cones Piper French

METRO 07

Young Thespians Kion You

ARTS 12

CD-Wrong Anna Bonesteel

FEATURES

FROM THE EDITORS

Historically, the Indy has been funded by Brown University. Recently, the undergraduate financial oversight board threatened to dissolve its financial commitment to the print and distribution of this paper, along with all other print publications funded by the university. Brown University is a privately held, multi-million dollar, tax-exempt institution. There is little that holds Brown accountable to the Providence community, but we think this paper is a little sliver of that puzzle. We will not let this paper go out of print and we've been heartened to know that Indy alums have felt the blow with us. We love you, we love Providence, and we love this paper.

Inside Camp Bulkeley Andrew Deck

But Like with Saxophones Kali Ridley

TECH 08

HuluPrime Noah Ezer

OCCULT 15

I Put A Spell on You Ruby Aiyo Gerber

METABOLICS 16

— WKD

Passion of the Christ Eve Zelickson

LITERARY 11

Wanted: Large Teddy Bear Teddy Davey

EPHEMERA 11

Home Remedies Kela Johnson

Adieu Adieu to You and You and You Indy Staff

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Lisa Borst

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You Katrina Northrop

Staff Photo Nicole Cochary & Liby Hays

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Claire Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson

SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Beth Taylor THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN THE MUNCHIES Zack Kligler, Julia Tompkins, Jamie & Chris Packs ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Kelton Ellis BY

KIDDIE MEAL It was 7PM, supper had come and gone, and our hero’s tummy had the rumblies, the phantom taste—his favorite McDonald’s cheeseburger—on his tongue. It was then and there that our odyssey’s protagonist, an unnamed but well-remembered eight year-old boy in East Palestine, Ohio, decided to take things into his own hands. After reviewing a few instructional videos on YouTube, the boy nicked the keys to his (sleeping) father’s van. Never one to leave a child unattended, he strapped his four-year-old sister into the passenger seat and set off. According to witnesses, the boy followed all traffic rules, stopping at red lights and driving below the speed limit, although a resentful neighbor noted a failure to use his turn signals. Our dynamic duo pulled up to the drive-thru McDonald’s on Market Street, a half mile from their home, with no intention of taking any charity burgers. Instead, they produced a piggy bank filled with enough money to cover several Happy Meals®. After realizing that they were not being featured on a YouTube prank show, employees at the chain called the police to escort the young adventurers home. Both were given cheeseburgers and fries on the house as compensation for their troubles. East Palestine police were impressed, if alarmed, at the feat, saying that they expected to see more damage or even an accident when they first received the report. But only East Palestine police officer Jacob Koehler truly got to the heart of the matter, reminding us all that The Internet™ is our real enemy here. “With the way technology is… kids will learn how to do anything and everything,” explained Koehler, no doubt pondering the immediacy of the singularity. “This kid learned how to drive on YouTube. He probably looked it up for five minutes and then said it was time to go.” As he dries his tears, this reporter, a twice-failed veteran of the NY state road test, is forced to accept that maybe it’s time for us millennials to acknowledge our inferiority and clear the roads for these hungry Digital Natives. At the very least, the Indy spies with its little eye a new target market for Seamless. -ZK

JAPAN UNCHIPPED

STRICT RATIONS

Japan is in a crunch. Last August, a record-breaking four typhoons hit the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan’s largest producer of potatoes. The typhoons ruined this year’s crop, throwing all potato related products into scarcity. The biggest loser? The Japanese snacking industry. Alright, you’re asking, why is this so bad? Import a couple million canisters of Pringles and call it a day. Give the people what they want. According to Bloomberg, potato chips made by the Japanese company Calbee—the nation’s leading snackfood vendor—rank as the most popular snacking products in Japan. Forget Pocky. The people have spoken and they want their chips. In line with global austerity measures, the reductions in chippage may be fitting. Fox News reported numerous import regulations limit the number of foreign ‘taters allowed in Japanese products. It’s the perfect opportunity to yell “Don’t tread on me!” especially because stepped-on chips are just shitty crumbs. Images of Japanese grocery stores paint a bleak portrait. Rows of shelves sit empty. Calbee suspended production on its most popular flavors, including “Lightly Salted,” “French Salad Dressing,” “Pizza,” and “Plum.” Other rivals in the Japanese chip industry have also suspended production. As a result, hungry citizens have taken to alternative markets. Fox News reported that bags of chips are selling for ¥1,250 to ¥1,500, or about $12 to $14, on the auction website of Yahoo Japan Corp. Under regular potato conditions, a single bag usually sells for ¥130, or $1.19. Beyond easily accessible auction sites, the precious chip supply has inundated less official markets. Single-person vendors have been spotted selling bags on the street. Some are even enforcing a “one-per-person” limit to meet with demand. Since the shortage began, the Twitter-sphere has been full of ‘tater-less tweeters. One customer reacted with halting optimism: “I realized how addicted I was to potato chips after the halt, I’ll be waiting for sales to resume. Hang in there!” (via Fox News). Numerous tweets are accompanied by images of empty grocery store aisles and captions of remorse. “It became difficult for the people to obtain potato chips,” one user wrote. Another tweeter posted only, “potato inflation state.” The only hope for resolution lies in lightening import restrictions. As Rie Makuuchi, a representative of Calbee, told Bloomberg, “We’re doing everything we can to resume sales again.” The future is uncertain. The public will wait for regulations to be changed. If they aren’t, Calbee and its competitors will depend on the next season’s harvest for a renewed spud crop. Until then, the shelves remain empty. The remaining chips will go to the highest bidder. Flavors like “Moist Mild Soy Sauce,” “Pizza Potato,” and even “Plum” are now reserved for the 1 percent.

Living with others is hard. For humans, cohabitation raises a seemingly insurmountable tide of petty conflicts. When in close proximity, two humans are prone to fight over attention, clothes, and food. And in the absence of parental mediation, someone will always come out on top. This week, we received yet another reminder that rats are not immune to the problems of humans. Unlike their non-rodent counterparts, however, rat rivalries are much more photogenic. A recently uploaded Youtube video titled “Subway Rats Fighting for Food - New York Subway Rats Again!” depicts two little vermins (brothers, we assume) squabbling over a piping hot churro. The video, which has gained nearly 100,000 views over the past nine days, comes as part of a long line of ravenous rodents caught on cam. A question: do rats have free will? Many conspiracy-prone forum-goers would say no. Zardulu, an NYC-based performance artist who was recently ratted out, has widely been cited by members of the online community as the force behind such beloved subterranean celebrities as pizza rat and selfie rat. There’s no definitive evidence at this point, but subway rat training programs aren’t out of the question. We think, however, that there’s something more primal at play here. You can’t teach a rat how to be a rat. Unless you are a rat... The churro rats, as they are often referred to, are bringing something new to the canon of viral vermin, something not offered by their pizza-toting and pole-dancing brethren: drama. And this is perhaps why so many people are invested in their saga. The churro rats’ skirmish speaks to a universal experience of familial friction that extends well beyond the rat community. Imagine this: two brothers walking through aisles of the local Costco, hoping to score some some lunch, maybe even a little dessert. What’s on the menu? Churros, hot and sweet. Mine! No it’s mine you ratfink!!! Perhaps YouTuber kepingitrealdothesame proposes one solution to the eternal problem of cohabitation in a churro-filled world: “split it on half there’s enough for both of you don’t be stingy!” -CP + JP

-JT

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NEWS

INDIVISIBLE LABOR Vermont’s migrant farmworkers organize for justice BY Piper

French

Ivan Rios-Fetchko DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander ILLUSTRATION BY

content warning: xenophobia, violent death Patricio Hernandez, Pato for short, lives and works on a dairy farm that sits just off of I-89, Vermont’s only highway. It’s postcard-perfect: a red barn, fields of corn for miles, heifers dotting the pasture. The farm’s owner is well known in the community and sells his milk to Cabot Creamery, a national dairy company. Pato’s apartment, which he shares with his two uncles, is built into one end of the farm’s multi-car garage. From the road, it’s impossible to tell that anyone lives there. The only sign that the structure is anything other than a shed is a small Justicia Migrante sticker on the doorpost. Justicia Migrante, translated as Migrant Justice, is the organization that Pato works with to fight for the rights of the approximately 1,500 migrant farmworkers, mostly from Mexico, who currently sustain Vermont’s dairy industry. +++ Vermont’s economy and its myth go hand in hand. Especially for out-of-state residents, it’s hard to imagine the state without thinking of its trademark products: maple syrup, farm-fresh milk, Cabot cheese, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The Ben & Jerry’s logo shows green fields filled with grazing cows; Cabot cheddar wrappers depict a barn and silo set against turning leaves or snowy pastures depending on the season, and stress that the company is “owned by our farm families.” The state has capitalized on its reputation as a bucolic agricultural paradise to sell products and build its brand at the same time: according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, dairy brings in over $2 billion to Vermont every year, and tourists contribute over $2.6 billion more, lured by images of fall foliage and men in flannel tapping maple trees. Notably absent from this pastoral narrative are the very people who make it possible: Pato and his fellow workers. Over the course of the past 20 years, migrant workers from Mexico and Central America have come to make up almost 90 percent of the dairy farm workforce in Vermont. As the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) brought cheap American corn to Mexico and made subsistence farming across Mexico unsustainable, many people, generally men, came to the US in search of higher wages in order to support their families and communities. A few of them ended up in Vermont, where they were soon joined by friends,

NEWS

brothers, and cousins. Pato came over from New York after his uncles told him that there was work available on their farm. It’s incontrovertible that Vermont farm owners rely on migrant workers for their labor at this point. It’s worth noting that the language that people, including members of Migrant Justice, generally use in reference to the farming industry reinforces the division between “farmers” (the farm owners, generally white, male Vermonters whose families have lived in the state for generations) and “workers” (employees who farm for a wage and are overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America). The traditional model of family farms that is still broadcasted by Cabot and Ben & Jerry’s is in crisis, and most native Vermonters are unwilling to perform the type of labor that such farming jobs require. And yet, “the hand that milks the cows is nowhere in sight,” Will Lambek, the communications director for Migrant Justice, told the Independent. Erasure of labor happens everywhere, especially when it’s provided by migrant workers of varying degrees of legal status. But the hypocrisy is especially pointed in a state like Vermont, which also derives a large part of its mythos from its feel-good hippie atmosphere and progressive politics. Moreover, many of the qualities that contribute to Vermont’s reputation also make it a remarkably difficult place to be a migrant worker, says Dr. Teresa Mares, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont whose research focuses on food insecurity among Vermont’s migrant farmworkers. Though labor and safety issues on the farms are fairly consistent with those experienced by migrant workers around the country—long hours with no time off, pitiful wages, dangerous machinery, and no workplace protection— other, more intangible factors add up. Vermont is 95 percent white, and dairy farms tend to be concentrated in the most isolated, rural, and conservative parts of the state. Grocery stores and doctors’ offices are “a hike,” as Vermonters say, and there’s little access to public transportation. Many of the state’s dairy farms are in Franklin County, close to the Canadian border, where there is a heavy border patrol presence. State police are more likely to collude with federal immigration officials, which has lead to a number of racial profiling cases in the past, according to Mares. “One of the largest factors in what allows the abuse to continue is the way the community has been invisibilized,” Lambek tells me the first time I meet him. Just seven years ago, Vermont’s migrant farmworkers lived sequestered on the farms— unable to drive,

afraid to go to the supermarket for fear of police or white Vermonters targeting them because of their nonstandard English and dark skin. In December 2009, amidst this shadow climate, a young migrant worker named José Obeth Santiz Cruz was pulled into a gutter scraper and strangled. +++ Not a lot is known of José Obeth’s time in Vermont prior to his death. In the only photos of him online, it’s winter. In one, he’s standing in the snow in jeans and a thin plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his face obscured by a falling flake. In the other he is squatting, giving the camera a thumbs up. He was just 20 years old when he died, and though many people from his rural community in Chiapas, Mexico, lived and worked on farms around Vermont, they had no way to come together for a memorial, Vermont Public Radio reports. Shocked by the death, a group of farmworkers and allies raised the money to bring José Obeth’s body back to his family in Chiapas. That trip lead to the formation of the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project, which grew into Migrant Justice in late 2011. Lambek, whose job is to spread Migrant Justice’s message to the English-speaking community of Vermont, is one of only two white employees—the rest are Latinx, and almost all have had experience working on farms in the past. The organization is overseen by the Farmworker Coordinating Committee, which is entirely composed of farmworkers. Asambleas (assemblies) are a crucial component of the organizing process: approximately once a month, migrant workers and their allies split into groups, discuss their organizing goals, plan for the battles ahead, and share food. It is one of the few moments of community and communion for people who almost never get a day off. Today, Migrant Justice is based in the back of an unassuming building in Burlington’s Old North End neighborhood. Posters and flyers paper the office’s walls, reminders of Migrant Justice’s past victories. In just seven years, the organization has engaged in coalition building and grassroots organizing to successfully advocate for everything from a law allowing undocumented immigrants access to driver’s licenses in 2013 to an anti-racial profiling policy requiring law enforcement agencies to implement“bias-free” policing, which was extended in 2014. In 2014, Migrant Justice petitioned Ben & Jerry’s to join the Milk With Dignity program, which had been adapted from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Fair Food Program implemented in Florida. The company “purchases the majority of its cream from St. Albans Cooperative farms where many (if not the majority)” of migrant farmworkers in Vermont are based, according to Migrant Justice’s website.

APRIL 21, 2017

Ben & Jerry’s has “staked its image,” in Lambek’s words, on its local sourcing and origin story—two guys scooping cones at a single shop in downtown Burlington—despite the fact that it is now owned by the transnational corporation Unilever and distributed across 34 countries. During the Milk with Dignity campaign, Migrant Justice capitalized on the company’s reputation as a progressive, socially-aware business. Brendan O’Neill, an organizer with Migrant Justice, told the New York Times, “They have fair-trade coffee. They have cage-free eggs. We think they can do more for dairy workers, too.” The strategy was a success: in May 2015, Ben & Jerry’s agreed to join the program and implement its demands, which include recognition of farmworkers’ fundamental human rights and the creation of third party monitoring bodies. It will also mean that the company pays higher prices per gallon of milk, which will positively impact both farm owners and farmworkers. +++ Pato is soft spoken, with a permanent half-smile, and sits with his legs tucked beneath him. He downplays his organizing role with Migrant Justice to me, but Lambek says he’s been involved almost since the beginning. Urgent problems—Pato had a broken heater in the middle of winter—are often the catalyst for migrant workers to reach out to Migrant Justice (generally via Teleayuda, the organization’s hotline). They usually represent only a fraction of the true mistreatment and injustice that workers experience, often without knowing that they have the right to be treated better. Working with Migrant Justice, “you learn things about your rights that you didn’t even know before,” Pato told the Independent, “as a worker, as a person.” He was especially active in the 2014 campaign to allow undocumented people access to state drivers’ licenses, which he described as “dos años de lucha” ("two years of struggle"). As a result of the new license laws, he says, “now we feel safer, more comfortable” venturing into the outside world to buy groceries or go to an appointment. When he first started work on his farm, Pato didn’t leave the property for over a year, not even for groceries or medical appointments. Over the course of their six-year relationship, Pato and his employer have built more trust between each other. Today, Pato earns $10 an hour, Vermont’s minimum wage, and has what he describes as a lighter schedule: one day off a week, split between two half days, and 36 hours of paid time off a month. He’s so upbeat about his current schedule that it’s easy to forget he still

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

works up to 14 hour days, six days a week—around 90 hours a week. Despite his history of being treated poorly, Pato has sympathy for the challenges of owning a dairy farm. “I understand—running a farm is difficult,” he tells me. It’s an attitude shared by Migrant Justice, which tries to emphasize the shared interests of farmworkers and their bosses. “When farmers get more for their milk, they can pay their workers more,” Lambek says. However, Migrant Justice doesn’t shy away from taking legal action against farmers who owe their workers back wages, or publicly decrying abuses when they occur. +++ Migrant Justice has most recently focused its energy on the “No Más Polimigra” campaign, a statewide push for police accountability that has its roots in the fair and impartial policing bill from 2014. Polimigra, a portmanteau of the words policia and la migra (immigration agents), describes collaboration between local police forces and federal immigration agents, which often results in arrest and deportation stemming from routine traffic stops. In one recent case in Grand Isle, near the Canadian border, a migrant worker named Lorenzo Alcudia was stopped by a sheriff on the way to a Migrant Justice meeting. Alcudia was asked if he was “supposed to be here” and held for over an hour until the US Border Patrol arrived and detained him. The car’s driver, who was white, received little more than a reprimand for speeding. After taking legal action against the county sheriff’s department, Alcudia won a $30,000 settlement for discrimination. Migrant Justice has also achieved success in the Vermont legislature: in July 2016, the state of Vermont passed an updated “Fair and Impartial Policing” policy, which will “provide legal guidance to ensure that ICE cannot unilaterally turn any precinct into a local Homeland Security outpost,” according to the Nation. Vermont’s small size and progressive beliefs mean that the state has frequently adopted laws significantly left of the federal government. Since the election, this gap has widened into a gulf. In the wake of President Trump’s attempts to expand the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the Department of Homeland Security and broaden the category of undocumented immigrants deemed a “priority for removal,” the “Fair and Impartial Policing” policy has become even more crucial for Ver-

mont’s migrant workers—and more controversial. Compliance with the policy will theoretically grant townships “sanctuary city” status, but it could also mean losing out on federal funds. According to the Burlington Free Press, there are currently several proposals in Congress to strip federal funding from sanctuary cities. These threats to the Fair and Impartial Policing policy, which come only months after it was finally made law, highlight the ways in which increased visibility can also translate to vulnerability. In the past month alone, ICE agents have arrested several Vermont-based migrant activists who have been vocal in their quest for greater rights. On March 23, undercover agents detained Alex Carrillo, who has been living in Vermont for seven years. The following day, two more activists, Enrique Balcazar and Zully Palacios, were pulled over by police while driving toward Burlington and then arrested. Matt Cameron, the attorney for all three, told Vermont Public Radio that his clients have been “the target for some time of surveillance and targeting… there’s nothing about Enrique that would set him apart other than outspoken advocacy for his community.” After protests by Migrant Justice and community members in Vermont and Boston, statements from Senators Sanders and Patrick Leahy, and letters in support (including one from Ben & Jerry’s), Balcazar and Palacios were released, but Carrillo remains in custody, and deportation proceedings for all three are underway—though the process will likely take years. In the meantime, Migrant Justice and its members will keep fighting. As of this month, they have reopened the Milk with Dignity campaign after the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s repeatedly put off signing the agreement. On April 4, activists protested alongside people waiting in lines to get ice cream on Free Cone Day. On May 1, International Worker’s Day, they will march from the original Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop to the Federal Building: tying the struggle for fair wages to resistance to the Trump administration’s discriminatory immigration policies, protesting a reality in which they are asked to provide their labor and punished for it at the same time. PIPER FRENCH B’17 thinks there’s no such thing as a free cone.

NEWS

BAD BLOOD BY Andrew

Deck ILLUSTRATION BY Bryn Brunnstrom DESIGN BY Andrew Linder content warning: racism, xenophobia, homophobia, gender-based violence The Windward Passage spans the distance between Port-au-Prince and Santiago de Cuba. It’s the strait left between the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola as their eastern and northwestern coasts stretch towards each other. American boats have long navigated this body of water as they travel on commercial and military trips from the Panama Canal up the Caribbean Sea to the eastern seaboard. But in the early months of 1992, the Windward Passage wasn’t only filled with cargo ships of Dole pineapples and Chiquita bananas or American gunboats, but with boats sailed by Haitian refugees. A coup in September 1991 had pushed tens of thousands of Haitians into poorly constructed dinghies on a dangerous journey to the Florida Coast. They were fleeing violence and the persecution of political dissidents following the removal of Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They would find little relief from the American government, and many refugees were soon entangled in the xenophobic policies and a larger political fight over the legal status of HIV+ immigrants. Rejecting the label of refugees, US media named them, simply, “the Haitian boat people.” Within several months of the coup, over 34,000 Haitian refugees had entered international waters seeking asylum. In response, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Bush Sr.’s administration sent National Coast Guard convoys to intercept boats before they could leave the Windward Passage. It was an effort to void the legal rights afforded to refugees who reached American shores—the right to a lawyer, due process, and equal protections under the law—while sidestepping the public relations fallout of turning away political refugees. Instead of receiving the refugees in Miami, the American government established an immigration processing center on a little known naval base, which was exceptional for its ambiguous legal status on the question of constitutional protections. A decade before the same grounds would become infamous for waterboarding and extraordinary rendition, an immigration detention center for “the Haitian boat people” was erected at Guantanamo Bay. +++ Most Haitians were deemed “economic immigrants” at the processing center, a category legally unworthy of political asylum. They were sent back to Haiti, the place they had risked their lives to leave. The remaining Haitians eligible for political asylum were caught in the liminal grounds of Guantanamo: in American military custody, but far from American soil where they could claim their international rights as refugees. Yolande Jean was one of those caught in the in-between. Before the coup, Jean

FEATURES

was a grassroots organizer who ran underground adult literacy programs in the face of the military’s efforts to subdue democratic mobilizations of the poor. She was three months pregnant when the military police arrested her. For five days she underwent torture and physical beatings as retribution for educating the illiterate. In interviews since and in her profile in medical anthropologist Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power, Jean says that when she left military jail, she left with the resolve to escape Haiti at any cost. Within weeks, she found herself detained again by a different military on a different is-

land, but only 200 miles from Port-au-Prince. At Guantanamo, her resolve was reconfigured but remained unwavering. In the press, the American government called the Guantanamo processing center a “humanitarian mission.” Under this pretense, all refugees considered for political asylum underwent mandatory medical inspections—including blood tests. “There were people who refused to have their blood drawn,” Jean recalls. “Soldiers came to handcuff them, tie them up in order to draw their blood.” The sometimes-forced extraction of blood by the military was not merely to improve medical treatment of

APRIL 21, 2017

Haiti and the mythology of AIDS

refugees, but to expose illness and disability. Blood could assist INS officials in identifying those with conditions deemed unfit for entrance into the US populace. Using these samples, 267 of the refugees, Jean included, were diagnosed as HIV+. This diagnosis not only endangered Jean’s life, but also her claim to asylum. In 1991, the US was one of the only countries in the world with an HIV immigration ban. The World Health Organization and CDC had both published memos calling the public health risk of HIV+ immigrants negligible. But the fear of HIV+ bodies engendered at the height of the AIDS epidemic would entrench the ban for over 22 years—it was only fully lifted in 2009. While the immigration status of each refugee was heard in court, Jean and 266 refugees were quarantined, and moved to a separate facility on Guantanamo called Camp Bulkeley. There, she received a new brightly-colored identification wristband that marked her HIV+ status. Although the Bush administration continued to use the word “humanitarian” in the press to describe Bulkeley, Haitians detained there have called Bulkeley a “concentration camp” and a “prison.” From 1991 to 1993, the 267 HIV+ Haitians were held on Guantanamo—some for months, others for years—trapped in their dual status as political refugees and “AIDS carriers.” Camp Bulkeley became the first detention center in the world for HIV+ immigrants. +++ The imaginary of gay activists and intellectuals had always prophesied AIDS detention camps. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a powerful New York-based AIDS research and political activist organization in the ’80s, had chosen as its symbol a pink triangle placed boldly against black. It signified the inverted pink triangles worn on the sleeves of “homosexuals” in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The triangles were inverted to mark “the transformation of a symbol of humiliation into one of solidarity and resistance.” Underneath the triangle was the equation, “SILENCE = DEATH.” ACTUP’s iconography understood AIDS as more than a mere moral panic, but the foundations of genocide. The state had taken a passive role in these deaths—ignoring cries by the medical and queer communities for research funding and an expansive public health response for nearly a decade—but their culpability remained clear to many. And for ACT UP and other activist groups, it took little creativity to envision these concentration camps. British AIDS activist Simon Watney notes that in 1987, nearly 57 percent of News of the World readers in the UK were “in favor of the idea that ‘AIDS carriers’ should be ‘sterilized and given treatment to curb their sexual appetite.’” 51 percent supported the total recriminalization of homosexuality. But in prophesying their own futures, the white gay men heralded as the leaders of AIDS activism may have lost sight of others marked for detention. While the queer community was far from silent during the imprisonment of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo, it’s important to recognize that it wasn’t only HIV+ men who were quarantined and imprisoned, and ‘homosexuals’ were not the only ‘risk-group’ blamed for an epidemic. +++ The first time I heard about AIDS I was in elementary school. We were standing on asphalt, waiting in line for our turn on the swings. My classmate leaned in to share a secret. He whispered in my ear, the way kids boast when they learn their first curse words, or what sex or divorce or

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

masturbation “is.” He whispered: The first gay got AIDS when he had sex with a monkey in Africa. I wasn’t the first or last to have this creation fable— the original sin of AIDS—whispered in their ear. There are countless adaptations. These myths originate in epidemiological studies that traced the strain of HIV most commonly found in America to chimpanzees in equatorial West Africa. Epidemiologists theorize that HIV was first transmitted to humans when people hunting these chimpanzees came in contact with their blood. But this epidemiological narrative has become twisted, laced with beastiality and racism in its turn towards mythology. While this origin story parallels and sustains the myth of a promiscuous and flamboyant Patient X, the target of its accusation and shame is different. It’s not just sexual deviancy, nor is it just homosexuality. It’s devolution, the absence of modernity. It’s Blackness and ‘Africa,’ the continental monolith. It’s ‘the jungle,’ with all its imperial implications of untamed wilderness and barbarity. Its disease-ridden, uncivilized people, the myth says. Ideology seeps into the cracks between the letters: The first gay got AIDS when he had sex with a monkey in Africa. Africa is reduced to a mere abstraction by those who practice the oral tradition of AIDS mythology, whispering stories furtively in the ears of children. In practice and policy, Americans would point their fingers much closer to home, towards an island once nicknamed little Africa off the coast of Florida. An island whose history as the first decolonized Black republic—like the mythology of AIDS origins—evokes a fear of Blackness in white America. In white America's gaze towards Haiti, these mythologies would mutate into policy. +++ In 1990, two years before the Haitian coup, the FDA passed an addendum to their blood donation recommendations. It banned the donations of anyone born or emigrated from Haiti, alongside anyone from the thirty-eight Sub-Saharan African countries. They publically reasoned that people from these countries were “high-risk” due to high incidences of HIV. But this time the FDA didn’t hide under the façade of Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) or “risky behavior.” The ban spoke explicitly and unequivocally to identity, not action. Every Haitian was a possible threat to the American public, the FDA said. As “AIDS carriers,” their blood could taint the purity of the American blood supply. In the weeks after the new recommendations were published—a more rigorous version of the limited Haitian blood ban passed in the early 1980s—Haitian-Americans protested across the country. 5,000 in Miami. 90,000 in Manhattan. They called out the ban as racist and xenophobic. It didn’t take long for the FDA to revise its recommendations to more precisely filter out blood donors, rather than broadly sweeping aside people from predominantly Black nations of origin. But the implications of the ban had already settled into the public consciousness. The ban, like the MSM ban before it, pulled on a thread that had woven through the American public: the mythology of AIDS origins. It was more than a ban; it was an accusation. +++ Soon after being moved to Camp Bulkeley, Yolande Jean was brought to a medical physician: “They gave me two pills and an injection,” Jean remembers. “I asked them, why the injection? Because you have a little cold, they replied. But it wasn’t a vaccine, it was an injection in the buttocks. And if you didn’t want it, you had no choice: they simply said, it’s for your own good. You have to

accept it, or they call soldiers to come and hold you, force you to take it, or they put you in the brig and brings your pills to you there. I learned that the injection the doctor had given me was Depo-Provera.” Depo-Provera is a birth control shot that contains the hormone Progestin, which inhibits conception by preventing ovulation and thickening the cervical mucus. It’s also known for being long lasting, upwards of three months. “I began having heavy bleeding. I bled for three months,” Jean recalls. “There were other women who’d had the injection before me, but I didn’t know that.” Legally, no justification can be given for forcing hormonal contraceptives on a detained refugee. But neither is there a medical justification for administering contraceptives to treat HIV. In fact, during the administration of Depo-Provera at Guantanamo there was no concern for treating HIV+ patients or preventing the transmission of HIV to sexual partners. Cathy Hannabach has called the injection of Depo-Provera into female Haitian refugees at Guantanamo “semi-permanent sterilization,” since, ultimately, the goal of the procedure was to inhibit the reproductive abilities of Jean and the other Haitian women. Here, blame is not placed on the homosexual man, but on the HIV+ Black woman, reduced to her maternity and condemned for infecting her unborn child. The phantom of an “AIDS baby” is an upsetting reality that in recent years has been degraded to punchlines that populate the locker rooms of middle school boys. Here, it is imbued with political power. The physician’s foretelling of an HIV+ infant was used to rationalize the state’s control of these Haitian women’s reproductive autonomy. And in the context of America’s history of imperialism in the Caribbean, that sentiment can be taken a step further to say it was used to rationalize a colonization of the womb. But it is hard to read this event apart from other instances of state-sponsored sterilization. In the cruel history of eugenics, sterilization was a tool to advance selective reproduction. More specifically, it was used to advance racial hygiene—the promotion of a superior white race. After the height of the American eugenics movement, sterilization of women of color continued under new intellectual banners. Beginning in 1937, sterilization was used on Puerto Rican women without informed consent as a “population control” method. By 1965, one-third of all mothers ages 20-49 in Puerto Rico had undergone a hysterectomy or tubal ligation, making a Puerto Rican woman 10 times more likely to have undergone a sterilization procedure than a mainland American woman. Birth control and alternative forms of contraceptives have also been implicated in these histories of sterilization, including the implantation of Norplant—an injectable birth control—into incarcerated women. In 1991, a California judge required Darlene Johnson, a mother of four and welfare recipient, to receive Norplant as a term of her probation. The decision followed an editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer a few months earlier: “Poverty and Norplant—Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” The sterilization of Haitian women at Guantanamo is distinct in its conflation of disease and race. The Camp Bulkeley physicians seemingly wanted to keep the blood of these women’s children “pure,” untainted by HIV. But in the toxic mythologies of AIDS, as HIV+ blood is entangled with histories of race-based violence, these physician’s pursuit of “blood purity” becomes an extension of these racist histories. ANDREW DECK B’17 wants you not to forget the word Bulkeley.

FEATURES

SHAKESPEARE (IN THE CITY) How theater is bringing Providence schools together

Kion You

ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel

Matesanz DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander

In 2008, Martha Douglas-Osmundson and her 14-year-old daughter traveled to London, excited to immerse themselves in London’s theater scene. They watched plays such as The Lion King and Wicked, completing their foray at Shakespeare’s Globe. To their surprise, the production of Hamlet that ran during their visit happened to be part of the Globe’s “Our Theatre” program, which brought together 450 students from Southwark, a diverse London borough, to stage the play. Douglas-Osmundson, known affectionately as Mrs. D-O, became entranced by seeing thirty kindergarteners recite Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy and non-verbal students in wheelchairs acting to their fullest capacities—ultimately, a major pushback against what Shakespeare has become in the educational canon. Douglas-Osmundson stated in an interview, “I saw Shakespeare completely free from pretension for the first time,” performed in its most human form. “I want to make that happen,” she said to herself that day, burning with a desire to somehow start the program back in Providence, where she taught at the independent, all-girls Lincoln School. Shakespeare in the City was conceived. Mrs. D-O handwrote 82 letters to every principal in Providence, but not a single person responded. However, one principal at Roger Williams Middle School pinned the letter to a bulletin board, which was chanced upon by Kaydi McQuade, the school’s theater teacher. McQuade immediately responded to Douglas-Osmundson, which lent Douglas-Osmundson the courage to cold call the other independent schools in Providence. Eventually, 10 schools coalesced to perform Hamlet in May 2009, the first iteration of Shakespeare in the City. Opening with the soft acoustics of “Behind Blue Eyes” by The Who, the arts-oriented School One opened the play with Barnardo’s frightened “who’s there?” For Douglas-Osmundson, that moment, as well as the student sitting next to her exclaiming “Mrs. D-O, this is so good,” solidified Shakespeare in the City as a program worth continuing. Now, Shakespeare in the City features 24 schools, and even has a waitlist of schools seeking to join. This year’s production is Macbeth. +++ Kaydi McQuade served as a theater teacher from 2006-2013 at Roger Williams Middle School, a state “intervention” school (a school targeted by Rhode Island for improval) that scored in the lowest five percent of schools in the state. McQuade became amazed at the capabilities of her actors, stating that “my students were able to find their voices in Shakespeare’s 400-year-old plays, even though they were nothing like his characters.” She praised the collaborative nature of Shakespeare in the City, both on an interschool and intraschool level, a stark contrast from what she described as the “siloed” nature of public middle school education. For McQuade, Shakespeare in the City not only brought together her predominantly low income, Latinx students with the Bard himself, but also united seemingly disparate students from across Providence, traversing racial, economic, and geographical lines. McQuade recalled a student who played the donkey-headed, slapstick Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream one year, and a Macbeth contemplating

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killing the king the next year. “I went to his graduation and cried,” McQuade told me, citing Shakespeare in the City as crucial in building his confidence and public speaking skills. Another one of her students started with a minor role, playing an auxiliary flute player in Hamlet, and the next year furiously vowed to kill Othello as the antagonist Iago. McQuade said that she “could hear a pin drop” in the audience during the soliloquy. After she finished, the audience roared in thunderous applause.

“Shakespeare in the City goes beyond Shakespeare. It ends up being about Providence, about community, about potential for kids, about exploring things outside of your comfort zone. It changes people, and builds confidence. It does stick with you.” Daigle firmly believed that the program “was really necessary to have for the kids … it’s changed so many people’s lives.” The two could not be a better duo to bring forth both the joy of Shakespeare and the bridging force his plays create, bringing “the City” together.

+++

The types of schools that participate in Shakespeare in the City range from private to public, from elementary to high school, and engage with students of all levels of ability. This intermingling of schools is the result of a very deliberate effort by Douglas-Osmundson, to create, in her words, “a cast that looks like Providence.” The unique personalities of each school wonderfully come to the fore throughout the cosmopolitan productions. Year after year, Meeting Street School second graders ace the opening monologue. Rhode Island School for the Deaf students act combat scenes with abandon, and one year performed Hamlet’s death scene, signing Hamlet’s dying words: “The rest is silence.” The acting of the Rhode Island School for the Deaf was so moving, it pushed one three-year Shakespeare in the City veteran to pursue the theater of the deaf as a career. Shakespeare in the City turns traditional Shakespearean acting on its head: because of a limited amount of roles, students not only double up on parts, but often perform the same character’s lines in groups of ten or more. A scene could see numerous Romeos break up the line, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” into “but soft,” “what light,” “through yonder,” and “window breaks.” The schools, when performing in tandem, create a kaleidoscope of theatricality. McQuade emphasizes this collaboration, telling me that “through Shakespeare in the City, I found a place where kids are learning from each other,” and it is through this creative exchange that Shakespeare in the City continues to better itself year after year.

When I asked Martha, broadly, “why Shakespeare?” she responded: “Shakespeare was all about human emotions. And so are these kids.” She firmly believes that “if the students could perform Shakespeare in front of this crowd, they could do anything,” and when asked to sum up the Shakespeare in the City experience, she replied, “it’s magic.” To McQuade, performing Shakespeare (“whose plays were never intended to live on as written documents”) allows students to comprehensively inhabit their roles and understand the musing of the Bard, as well as be empowered to explore their own forms of expression. Shakespeare in the City serves as not only an enrichment program, but as a door to a general passion for arts, theatrical or otherwise.

+++ Last summer, Anna Steinberg B’19—who performed in Shakespeare in the City’s first iteration—and Alex Daigle B’19 decided to create a full-length documentary about the program. Steinberg is currently producing and editing the film, while Daigle is focusing on coordinating the logistics of its production—together, they form a formidable pair. Steinberg remembers playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, recalling her glorious entrance into the theater: “While an ’80s song played, all of us Pucks—there were a lot of us—entered through the back of the packed Lincoln School theater. Everyone turned to look at our tiny selves and the stereo we carried blasting the music. I just remember thinking that I could be super self-conscious and embarrassed of myself, or just skip in and be Puck.” Both Steinberg and Daigle are using the documentary to convey their immense appreciation towards how the program transformed (and will continue to transform) students. Steinberg explained that

+++ There is only one full rehearsal before the actual performance, where the hundreds of student performers meet each other, many for the first time. During this rehearsal, Brown students visit the program to workshop acting techniques with students. The students also get a chance to interact with others beyond their schools, through icebreakers, such as meeting “knee” and “elbow” partners (essentially bumping knees and elbows with strangers), and offering each other encouragement before the show. This year’s production of Macbeth will occur at the Veterans Memorial Theater (the Vets) on May 16, at 6PM. The show will feature 24 schools in the beautiful and imposing architecture of the 2,000 seat theater, complete with high domes and Baroque ornamentation. The intense amount of preparation in stuffy English classrooms will inevitably become vibrantly manifested in a theater fit for philharmonics. McQuade sums up the typical first reaction of students as “whoa.” After each school performs its scene, the actors head down what has been known as the “squeeze stairwell” to get to their seating. The squeeze stairwell name is exactly what it suggests: a visceral squeezing out of the mounds of adrenal energy left over from the performance. The kids, according to McQuade, scream “Keeeek!” and jump up and down, hugging their fellow performers. After all remaining energy has been let go, the actors sit back down in the balcony of the theater, cheering on the rest of the schools. KION YOU B’20 invites you to see the Shakespeare in the City perform Macbeth at the Veterans Memorial Theater on May 16.

APRIL 21, 2017

SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE The impending writers’ strike and the problem with peak TV BY

Noah Ezer

ILLUSTRATION BY Teri

Minogue DESIGN BY Kelton Ellis “West Board and East Council voted unanimously to move forward with a strike authorization vote,” begins television producer, director, and writer Eric Wallace. Opening a video directed to both the general membership of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and to his employers, Wallace and the other members of the union’s Contract Negotiating Committee carefully outline their current situation: they’re losing the battle to renegotiate the terms of the entertainment industry’s standard contract for writers. “We create the content seen all over the world, and the companies are making a lot of profit off of that,” Zoanne Clack, writer-producer of Grey’s Anatomy and committee member continues in the clip. Alluding to the meager gains the union achieved after the 2007-08 Writers’ Strike, she concludes, “We need to leverage the power we have at the negotiating table, so that we are able to get a fair deal when we go back.” Composed of two smaller unions, the WGA West and the WGA East, the WGA advocates for the workers’ rights of television, film, and radio writers nationwide. The organization ensures standardized compensation, pensions, and health plans; it also assists in labor disputes with the TV and movie studio trade association, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The AMPTP’s membership includes nearly all companies an American television or film writer would or could work, like Disney, Sony, CBS, NBCUniversal, The Weinstein Company, Paramount, Lionsgate, and Warner Bros. Every four years, the WGA and the AMPTP meet to renegotiate the standard contract used across the country. Negotiations between the two organizations broke down in 2007 in a dispute over the payments writers would receive when their film was sold as a DVD or distributed in the (then-emerging) market of online streaming services. A 100-day strike ensued. Original TV programming ceased production, crews stopped coming into work, and, according to conservative estimates, Los Angeles County lost $2.5 billion from entertainment related industries. Since then, online viewership has grown exponentially, but writers’ payments from services like Netflix have remained relatively stagnant. As audiences continue to cut the cord and the industry braces for another work stoppage, one major issue is seemingly missing from the discussion: Netflix isn’t at the negotiating table. +++ In 2007, only months before the last writers’ strike, Netflix launched a 1,000-title movie streaming application. Originally limited to only those with pricey, high-speed internet connections, their expansion wasn’t taken particularly seriously by the WGA, the AMPTP, or industry analysts. Shortly after, Netflix began including TV shows, and in 2011, when internet subscriptions with more bandwidth had become widely accessible, the company acquired the rights to stream the first four seasons of AMC’s critically acclaimed drama Mad Men. Noticing their customers’ tendency to rent an entire season’s worth of DVDs for other long-form shows like The Sopranos, Netflix put all of the seasons online at once. TV critics and scholars believe that Netflix’s decision to release multiple seasons of shows with season-long story arcs, created what we now know as binge-watching. Because of shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos, television has entered what many in the industry are calling a “Third Golden Age.” Network offerings have more than doubled since streaming services entered the marketplace, and FX Networks president John Landgraf coined the term “peak TV” to describe the rapid expansion in studio profits and scripted programming permeating the airwaves. There has never been more money or more content available, but this apparent

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

prosperity has come at the expense of those behind the camera. The increasing popularity of streaming combined with the flood of viewable material has fundamentally altered the way the TV industry is structured. Because networks understand that viewers want to binge watch an entire season or show, executives have slashed the average number of episodes in a production by nearly 50% in order to ensure that viewers have a breadth of content to consume at all times.

as negotiations fail. The problem, the AMPTP says, is that they don’t know how many people are watching each of their shows, so they can’t pay Netflix, and other streaming companies like Hulu, an accurate amount of money for licensing or get a read on how many viewers are watching their programs online. This, in turn, allows the AMPTP to deny writers’ demand for accurate compensation. As the labor they rely on is squeezed, Netflix has remained silent on the strike altogether. +++

Writers, instead of a salary, are paid a union standard, flat rate per episode. They then receive additional payments anytime an episode is replayed or streamed. With the reduction in season lengths, many writers have been seeing similar reductions in their earnings for years, regardless of how many new shows are on the air. Production companies’ drive to cheaply produce fresh content and to maximize profits has also caused the AMPTP to exploit a ‘single-draft’ clause in the last set of WGA contracts to pay newer, younger writers even less. By paying for only one version of a script, the AMTP pushes less-established writers to do multiple, unpaid rewrites in the hopes that they’ll eventually earn a larger payout. Adding to the union’s financial stress, an increasing number of WGA members have begun to retire, drawing on the organization’s reserves for their healthcare and pension plans. Mirroring the larger political discussions around federal funding for Social Security and Medicare, the cost of caring for baby-boomers in the WGA, which would currently bankrupt the organization by 2021, places financial strain on the youngest generation of writers to support the older without an increase in wages. Despite this, the AMPTP has refused to give. Using their tangled relationship with online streaming corporations to deflect blame, the AMPTP has been leveraging the union’s financial trouble to pressure the Negotiating Committee into accepting a subpar deal. Compounding this standoff, Netflix doesn’t publish ratings data. Because they consider their company’s primary product the technology that allows streaming rather than the shows themselves, the only metric Netflix needs to sustain growth is their subscriber numbers. All of their own content creation is relegated to one division of the company, and they still primarily view themselves as a distributor instead of a producer. Despite successful, multi-season shows like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, creation at Netflix is seen as a way of generating buzz to increase subscribers, and Netflix is projected to stay in debt from these productions for the next decade. Ted Sarandos, the corporation’s Chief Content Officer, views the idea of specific numbers about each show as irrelevant. “Big Data,” he explained in a New York Times interview, “helps us gauge potential audience size better than others,” and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with not making information about each program’s viewership public, Netflix’s market position allows them to sit back without consequence

The absence of streaming services at negotiations also presents wider repercussions for those whose labor is considered ‘unskilled,’ but is still essential to the production of TV and film, such as lighting technicians, camera and mic operators, and video effects artists. While over $500 million was lost in writers’ wages alone during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, those working in hourly capacities on production sets like electricians, construction workers, and set designers lost almost double that. Formal studies of the strike have used traditionally broad categories of labor, but the remaining $1.3 billion ‘ripple effect’ felt by Los Angeles County, according to economist Jack Kyser, was overwhelmingly shouldered by hourly, potentially nonunionized workers throughout the area in industries like catering, delivery, and hospitality. With the dramatic decrease in union membership of any kind over the last 20 years, it’s entirely unlikely that anyone will be advocating for these workers in the current negotiations, leaving them vulnerable to a strike that disproportionately affects them. In the time of ‘peak TV,’ production has gone global in search of ideal locations to populate our screens. While there are still an increasing number of productions happening in the US, shows like Game of Thrones film in up to five different countries at a time, and companies like HBO employ hundreds of these hourly, nonunionized people along the way. Other portions of TV production have similarly begun to leave the country. Taking advantage of the traditional methods of ‘outsourcing’ utilized by large, multi-national corporations, smaller networks like SyFy have begun employing VFX teams from outside of the US for substandard wages. To keep up with the increasing demand for content, networks are minimizing costs in traditionally corporate ways, which has created a larger, international web of exploited labor, reliant on the constant creation of programming. With another work stoppage looming on the horizon, network TV may be readying itself for another major shift. The recent increase of TV programming, brought on by the advent of streaming and the unwillingness of large corporations to take a reduction in profits, has been predicated on an arms race of undervaluing each subsequent link in the chain of creative production. Wallace, closing out the video to his fellow WGA members, explains that the purpose of the union, and the potential strike, is “making writers’ lives better.” That statement, and much of the reporting on this strike, highlight the precarious position of being one of many exploited labor groups. Without a call for collective improvements, throughout the entirety of the production process, the cycle of extraction can be continually passed down the production cycle until those who are unable to advocate for themselves so publicly are the only people left without what they need. But with Netflix blatantly ignoring their role, a discussion like that can’t even begin to happen. NOAH EZER B’19 wants you to support collective power.

TECH

A SPELLBOUND SEMES The professor of my Survey of African-American Music course faced the wall and played the saxophone for the first 10 minutes of class. This was my second week at Spelman College as a domestic exchange student from Brown University. The music entranced my professor so much that he seemed to forget his lecture on John Coltrane; he could focus only on his breath, fingers, and ears. “Why hello, my brothas and sistas!” he greeted the class of over 30 Spelman students after he finished playing, acting surprised, as if he didn’t know we were there. Dr. Ralph Jones was a kind, musically talented, and socially aware professor of music and Africana studies. Jones’ artistic affect made his classes accessible, laidback, easy even. Every class, we listened to music, discussed its importance in the context of African-American history and our lives, and then went about our way humming the tune of one of the many jazz, R&B, or blues songs we learned about. During class, Dr. Jones would make us yell out the lyrics of the songs we listened to, knowing full well that we felt embarrassed doing so. “Be proud of the lyrics!” he would yell above our haphazard attempt to verbalize the assigned portions of John Coltrane, Ma Rainey, Nina Simone pieces played on the classroom stereo. “These are the words of your people!” He paused. “Feel their pain. Feel their spirit.” We rolled our eyes at him, feeling neither pain nor spirit, just discomfort. But deep down, beyond my eye rolls, I knew what Dr. Jones wanted us to feel. Sometimes, when I could remove myself from the hustle and bustle of campus life, I would stop in my tracks, breathe in, and quietly celebrate the spirit and the legacy that Spelman emanated. I tried hard never to take my semester there for granted. This semester was the first—and probably only—time in my life I was able to surround myself with people who were most like me. I was and am very different from traditionally enrolled Spelman students, given that I go to Brown. But over time, my sense of difference was confronted and transformed there. For me, he common ground of being Black allowed the tensions of being different to gradually wash away. Many questions I had in class, at social events, walking on campus, and beyond could simply be answered through reflection on my sense of Blackness and Black culture. This idea of Blackness as the answer is not an attempt to oversimplify being Black, but rather to revel in the beauty of having an identity, and being in community with people who aligned with it. On cue, in the final segment of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme Part I – Acknowledgement,” the class emulated the deep vibrato in the song and recited the lyric together: “a love supreme” over and over again until far after the song ended. “a love supreme” “a love supreme” “a love supreme” “a love supreme” Every Thursday, Dr. Jones ended class by yelling life advice at us as we moved toward the door. “Fall in love this weekend! You only go to Spelman once.” He was right, and my time there was even more abridged than that of my classmates. And he did help me fall in love: not with another person, but with the magic of the school. And the magic of Spelman catalyzed my journey of healing, understanding, and falling in love with myself.

FEATURES

+++ Spelman was founded as Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in 1881, and therefore holds the distinction of being America's first private, historically Black liberal arts college for women. In 1884, the Seminary’s name changed to honor Laura Spelman Rockefeller and her parents, who were longtime abolitionists. Spelman has educated many successful and well-known alumnae across many disciplines for over 125 years. Now, with nearly 2,100 students, the college exists in a larger consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) called the Atlanta University Center, including Spelman’s all-male ‘brother’ school, Morehouse College, as well as Clark Atlanta University. Black college-bound students were often denied admission to other colleges due to systemic racial discrimination. The first HBCUs were founded before the US Civil War in Pennsylvania and Ohio. However, most HBCUs were established to educate freed slaves after the war. The second Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed in the 1890s, mandated that states that used federal higher education funds provide an education to Black students, either by accepting them into majority white universities or by establishing schools specifically to serve them. The remainder of HBCUs were created prior to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which expanded federal funding for colleges and universities nationwide, and gave these colleges their designation of HBCU. HBCUs flourished in the 20th century, attracting the best and brightest Black students and professors. Now, many Black high school seniors looking to apply and attend college are currently forced to make a choice between enrolling in a predominately-white institution (PWI) or an HBCU. The remnants of Jim Crow-era discrimination impacts the schools Black students decide to attend, and the choice between HBCUs and PWIs has engendered an unsolvable debate within the Black community over which type of school is considered the right choice. “There is something powerful about attending an institution that was built for you,” wrote Skylar Mitchell, current Spelman sophomore in her New York Times op-ed, “Why I Chose a Historically Black College.” She continues, “Most colleges were built for white students, or at least, with only white students in mind. At Spelman, I found a place for myself in the curriculum, and an opening to learn what it means to be me.” Until college, my best friends were white, my teachers and coaches were white, and my social life beyond my family was largely white. In many ways, I was like my peers. We all played on the same field hockey team, learned algebra in the same classrooms, and ate the same chocolate chip Chewy bars after school. But the one difference, my Blackness—which was rarely discussed but always acknowledged through second looks, one-off questions, and ‘no offense’—was always the elephant in the room. Because of this, I’ve become an adaptable, self-aware person. However, this upbringing has also been damaging and subsequently created many self-confidence issues; by age 18, I felt like I got along better with white people than I did my own. My mother went to Spelman, and I grew up wearing Spelman t-shirts to bed and hearing about the marvel of this special place. I decided to go to Brown for various reasons, but I admit that it felt like the more comfortable choice because of how I grew up and who I grew up with.

APRIL 21, 2017

STER

Race and identity as a Brown girl at a Black college BY Kali

Ridley

Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Dolma Ombadykow ILLUSTRATION BY

+++ During the semester I was enrolled, Spelman inaugurated its 10th President, Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell. To highlight her promise to enhance Spelman’s arts programs under her leadership, the inaugural celebration lauded acclaimed Black artists and included acts from the award-winning playwright and Spelman alumna Pearl Cleage, dance shows choreographed by and performed with Diane McIntyre, and a film screening and question and answer session with Academy Award-winning filmmaker and Morehouse alumnus Spike Lee. Of the three, I was most excited to see Spike Lee. As part of his visit, he showed his latest film, 2 Fists Up: We Gon Be Alright, which detailed the socio-political and racial unrest that unfolded at the University of Missouri and the Concerned Student 1950 movement; the resulting turmoil led to the resignation of Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri school system. 2 Fists Up poignantly captured the experience of what it is like to be a Black student at a PWI in a country that continues to perpetuate racial prejudice and marginalization. The film clearly depicts the overt hatred on Missouri’s campus and the sadness and anger its Black students had to channel to make changes in the university they attended. Watching it made me appreciate Brown, even if only 6.7 percent of the student body is Black. Brown is less than perfect, and very white, but generally progressive. Watching the film, however, also made me further appreciate the comfort and protection that going to Spelman provided me. Spike Lee reminded me that I, in fact, was not an HBCU student after all. He told the audience, which was packed to the brim with both Morehouse and Spelman students, that they were lucky to go to school where they did, because “if you’re not an athlete you catch hell [being Black] at these white schools.” I remember being torn from my daydream and looking abruptly up from my seat. I felt as if he was talking to me. From the book Citizen by Claudia Rankine, I learned that racial trauma—the amalgamation of all of the micro-aggressions; this “hell” Lee speaks of—has a name, John Henryism. We experience post-traumatic stress disorder from the war between our bones naturally trying to form against those who consistently work to break them. “We do catch hell,” I whispered to Gabrielle, my closest friend that semester. Our mothers were roommates together at Spelman. “What?” she replied, confused. She wasn’t listening. And she didn’t have to; she had three more long, rich years at Spelman. What Lee said did not apply to her. Lee’s words sent me into a panic, as I realized I would have to leave this euphoric experience in a few short weeks. Growing up in predominantly white schools and then attending Brown, I had never known what life was like outside of this “hell” until I left. +++ I remember the awe I felt when looking at the entire freshman class around me, probably 500 students, as they lined up to walk into Sister’s Chapel, the cornerstone of Spelman’s campus on the school’s founder’s day. Sister’s Chapel, a stately brick building supported by white Doric columns, houses many important spiritual and traditional Spelman

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ceremonies. It’s also the building where the campus community annually celebrates the founding, growth and accomplishment of the school, its students, and its alumnae. The excitement was palpable. I felt a rush of warmth standing amongst the crowd, immersed in this experience at the same exact level as the freshmen surrounding me. This experience was just as new to me as it was to them. For the first time since the semester started, I didn’t have to play catch-up or ask questions that made me look like a newbie. Together, we formed an ironic sea of white as the uniform color of our dresses melded together against the variegated tones of our brown skin. Our beauty literally took my breath away. This was a defining moment in my semester, as I felt like an authentic Spelmanite. As I walked through the doors of the chapel and up the stairs towards my seat in the balcony, I felt history in the balls of my feet. I can’t remember the details of each performance on Founder’s Day. We sang, we prayed, we danced, we laughed, I cried. I felt so fulfilled to be a part of this legacy, this tradition, this community. “I just don’t want to leave,” I told my friends as I wiped my tears from my eyes. “We don’t want you to either,” Gabrielle replied to my tears. “Just stay!” But I couldn’t. This semester was my time; I had to be grateful for it no matter how short, because although I could not complete my college career at Spelman, I could have never come at all. I had chosen to go to Brown and wanted to see that choice until the end. During Founder’s Day, I wondered if I could only be a proud, confident, Black woman at Spelman around other proud, confident, Black women. I feared what would happen to me and my sense of self when I returned to Brown. At this moment, the beginning of the end of my Spelman semester, the PWI vs. HBCU debate had come to the forefront of my mind. The unanswerable question arises again: which school is “better”—Spelman or Brown? Spelman, where one gets to feel empowered, strengthened, and accepted for just who one is? Where one builds a network of amazing people who simply get you? Or Brown—where one can be thoroughly challenged and pushed in ‘important,’ academic ways, but are often left feeling empty or unfulfilled in others? I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to engage with both experiences during my time in college. When asked if I wish I had gone to Spelman from the start, I can confidently say no, because the experience would not have been so rich without a benchmark to compare it to. I’m sure I would have enjoyed myself, and assumed the role of full-time Spelmanite wholeheartedly. Yet I would have taken the warmth, history, love, and traditions of the school for granted. As a Black woman, to live and learn in a community where I could be in the majority was an unparalleled experience. But it’s not how life in the “real world” is, so to speak, which is why PWIs like Brown are necessary for many to develop in. I have to accept and hold the beauty of both the PWI and HBCU experience, and be content with how fate has curated a large portion of college. Ultimately, the way I view myself as a Black woman in this dynamic and challenging world means accepting and reveling in this dichotomy I’ve engaged with in order to persevere successfully throughout my life. KALI RIDLEY B’17 loves supremely.

FEATURES

THE CORNER OF THE BEACH Bridging a gap in narrative tactics Anna Bonesteel ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Anna Bonesteel BY

Question Watch the following segment for bullshit. Experiment 1A There is a new corner of the beach at the elbow of Cape Cod. Usually, beaches are long, straight lines. This is easy to remember, because they mirror the straight line of the horizon, which is where the sky and ground meet. Here, the sand stops like a sawed board. The end is “no point,”—instead, a fat clunk. One tide (L) slaps against the other (R) as it processes down a snub. Eventually it finds what it is: the literal end of the road. Local newspapers sideline this material fable. Assuredly, the corner is an Effect to a grander Cause; a new break in Chatham’s barrier beach. This ecological event (an inevitability, following a landmark 1987 breach) is what is receiving a lion’s share of the press. The corner, and the material of proof, is shored-up. My personal belief is that the neglect doesn’t bother the corner, which is in the process of rounding itself off. Becoming a pen-tip instead of a table’s crummy edge. To the editor: this procedural softening is a tasty affect, but less definable and less stomach-sating than the explicit ker-chunk of an outer crust’s rupture in one overnight sublimation. The breach follows a large and natural momentum but makes something weird and human: a corner, with the many understood significances of silence, hiding, and degrees. Hypothesis Okay. What did you come up with? The argument, never explicitly stated, is further masked by the documentarian’s clear-printed bias. Attention uniformly paid to the “soft” knowledge of corner formation and a preoccupation with metaphoric efficacy dissolve into a mythic doctrine (“anarchist-without-a-clause”). The medium is tactical ignorance; or, tonal bullshit. Bullshitting is a low-tech way to fill the space of the air with material that is true to its own senses. It is quiet propaganda, because it reorganizes “if/thens” for its own sake. Though this sounds like a black-hat practice, it can be quite aesthetic, even beautiful—the woven complication gives it a padded, admirable, craft. It creates its own grounding. It anthropomorphizes, it scales and appraises, but it does not capitulate, and it does not wash off. It performs and can do so with grace. It, strictly, does not: “mean.” Bullshit is a bureaucratic necessity. A false structure in a social system: a knot that, in spite of its fuzziness, operates as one tangle, well-spun, but uniformly confused. Experiment 1B On a trip to collect some sand, silt, and photographs with my friend and research partner Jonah, I climbed over many piles, wishing I could twist my baseball brim around to the back. My head was lacking both content and container, and I felt extremely bare in the peninsular air. Here’s a question: Is the wave-piece a short story?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Well, many short stories, says Liby, diarrhea or spiral out of “a single manic episode.” Wave-slaps, facing an unsure, silk-tongued narrator? Yes, it seems the arrangement qualifies. Lots of story-telling is bullshit, tastefully arranged. If faking-it is not outted automatically as a “hiding” gesture, then there are a thousand possibilities to get swept up in. Fictive frailty implodes a generalizing hope, and implicates witnesses in pesky attempts to support or sustain what may be an evil argument. Formal dislocations, like the flip of effect-andcause in the water above, or in the poetic induction of totally imaginary crud, are choices meant to create trust in narrative method. When decisions are faked, faked, faked, there is a build-up of bullshit debris. Have you ever been asked to get one form signed, then the next, then the next? Where do you think they all go? The system supports its particular maintenance (as it must), but sometimes things get out of control. Hypothesis Back at Chatham Beach, there is a pilgrimage going on. Everyone wants to see the new breach in the sandbank. I had a tough time understanding what a breach might be—it seems that this word is a generality, applied to this specific kind of rip. Basically, it’s a failure in material. The Ford Ranger had just made it out there. Something was wrong with the car, which made it shake at low speed. The seats of the car were plated in shifting scales like looking-glasses, which are actually CDs. Gripping the car seat. Slipping into the CDs. CDs not breaking under ass. Another failure in material. Weird self-moment of the CDs under ass. The CDs start then stop to turn into a chain mail. Improvisationally pick-up the CD: the CD-reader does a droplet of a read on the metal surface and maxes it out of control. Breaks the CD by reading the CD. The CD mechanics cause you a problem, then charge you $250 to take a look at it. Fatal misconduct of the pulled-tide… The water failed its own style-guide, I introduce two essays, as proof-of-holes, and later sand-bank evidence. Experiment 2A Holding a CD in one’s hand, one would wish that it were 3D. But it looks weighs and smells like total flatness, total to the edge of vision, flat and super-zoomed. What if, the flatness eats itself out. Forward, into idea, that digital insertion is the idea that the smallest segment of the thing might be a large exploded whole of the thing, rather. Rather, that the sample is justly equivalent to whole; that the sample contains all the necessary information to reconvene the Geneva convention of the many-numbers in the parts of a few. Meditating on the fearful CD, the thing feels so two-dimensional that it would burn a hole through the palm-pilot and sink down into the realm of flatness, another word about deadly, that which is unspecific predisposed and skinny-planar. Hell is about the Lowest Common Denominator. The CD, would wish it were 3D, notes on the reflectivities, so squandered on this disc,

oughta-be like a sphere to me and levitate skillful like Jem, like Brass Skyy, Maus. Experiment 2B Digital music is all like a bunch of buggy levers like on the stomach of a six leg bug. It goes creak crick creak as it balances itself There and Back Again. Pull the lever and the bug goes crick crick crick. That’s why headphones put wires into our bodies, to turn them into antennas, and it’s part of a global conspiracy to turn humans into bugs. I don’t have many science fiction story ideas, but I’ve had two in the last week. One was that the sun won’t rise again. I think this has been done before but not in the way I want to do it. The other was that one traffic light in America stops working and it causes at first fairly minute problems but because of the basic human character of the first person affected by this shift, the effect exacerbates the universe and causes extreme global panic. These ideas are, as you can see, oval mirrors of each other. That’s why the entire two-part story is called the oval mirror story and why it is macroeconomic, but microergonomic as a library (seeing as it only takes up two books on the shelf). Conclusion Where choices don’t make special sense. For instance, I quote A. myself B. relationally to me, not in terms of logic, but in terms of space; mixing of different temperatures of water is irreversible. I had a friend once who purchased a GAP baseball hat. It was a branded hat, with the logo of the GAP across the top. A decision. Manipulation of decisions is -editorial lies, One weirdness or inaccuracy would form an outlined experience. It’s a failure in normal activity. In this one odd failure, taking a bath in un-normal, and this bullshit pond allows you to support other positions. My impulse to position Chris as savior is kind of krypto-internalized patriarchism. I ignore my impulse to be true to my OWN self, allow my own Rogue element, and instead begin to submit to the narrative of explaining-logic. This is why the swallowing of Bullshit is sinister, self-reinforcing. It can be just a material, instead. At the root of it, it’s a fear of not knowing. Mangle the water together. It would then, disappoint itself. Right after a collision, there is a time during which everything is unsure. Manipulation of this point (pushing one pixel up, one pixel down, in blue or magentas) is a tactical art—re-twisting the general impulse for nonfixity into a series of BULLSHIT FACTS. These are popcorn attacks on a long-term congealing meaning. Quarks! The new corner: the beach-forms haven’t rusted yet. Parallel puddlings of wave-splat echo the swell. The science of bull-shit is this, an unfixable sandbank push-around. ANNA BONESTEEL RISD’18’s right brain feels left-out. LIBY HAYS B/RISD’19 contributed reporting.

ARTS

TOE TAGS BY Indy

Staff

Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Dolma Ombadykow ILLUSTRATION BY

AD Name: Andrew Deck Age: 22 Hometown: Transylvania Favorite color: BLOOD RED Hobbies: Genealogy. Trips to the dentist. Sneaking into the village. The game of Operation. First aid. Looking For: someone as nocturnal as he is. Something casual but very communicative. Also true love. Must have sparkling teeth. Ideal Date: let’s meet at the blood bank, look at bags, chew on a candy bar. That or coffee in the Underground. Hi there. I’m Andrew. I love amusement parks and longform creative nonfiction. Sure, it’s a bit startling when I walk up to you in my crisp button down, slim pants, coiffed hair, and tell you what I’m really into— blood. But as soon as I flash that million dollar smile you can’t help but melt—I radiate warmth. And earnestness. I’m refreshingly earnest.

Every Wednesday, Josh Kurtz spends 6 hours in a seminar room adorned with wooden carvings—but of what? Something literary for sure, although this Toe Tagger imagines that Josh’s attention has never wandered far enough to really dwell on them. But in a way, Josh, with his academic sheen, is not so unlike these chiseled cherubs: composed to their stiff; wry to their perpetual smirk; sometimes almost… vulnerable to their butt-nakedness. Under the versatile gaze of the Pembroke Center walls, one wonders what Josh could possibly be doing for those six hours. Taking careful notes about transnational epistemologies? Plotting fundraising steps for the small press he’s been running for years? Discretely Facebook messaging Chris Kraus in search of a job? (Don’t give up hope, Josh! Maybe her account is just…inoperative!) Or all of these, and more, at once? Josh is versatile too, can shift registers swiftly and fluidly, lyrical to lucid, poetic to politcal, frenzied about his thesis to affirmative about yours—all this in a second.

Last night I drifted off midway through a sports biopic and sunk into a strange dream. I awoke this morning recalling only fragments: I. Milk jug of jello Blue jeans/Red turtleneck Wilting plants Salsa pasta II. Underwhelming whaling museum No Moby Dick New Order Bell bottom leggings/ Christmas shoes

III. Going/coming Gym lobby poet Sewing into paper Slime IV. Sardine plate Blinking brain Linking any, all things Easy consoler V. Kindness so wide That which leaches out Stretches round you And back again

I awoke deeply skeptical. What was it all about? Could a milk jug really be made of jello? I decide that the dream is about the translatability of a certain post-minimalist’s personal appeal to hyper-fluid cyclicality. Whatever it was, I’m sad that it’s gone. As I got out of bed, I rolled over and found a small glob of jello on my pillow. Such a strange apparition. I turned to check if there was anyone there. There wasn’t, but… did I leave that window open?

MC “My oh my what a complex algorithm,” you say. “Eh, I’ve seen worse,” Meryl responds with a sly wink, unfazed by the rows of complex code pulled up on her desktop. Right as you’re about to lose your cool, Meryl puts her hand on your shoulder and grins calmly. “You’ve got this,” she says, and you believe her. Later, you and Meryl toss a regulation-sized disc back and forth on a patch of soft grass and forget that computers even exist.

RB RB is so cool that she’ll probably never read this. Giving us a certain amount of freedom here. But she already knows that, knows that her mere presence in a room—merely bringing her up—changes how people act, loosens them up, makes them a little funnier, try a little harder. R could do so much with her charisma that it sometimes frightens me. A little glimmer in her eye lets you know that she knows this and that she loves that you know it. Then all of a sudden you find her asleep on the couch, everyone dancing around her, and you think that that’s really the coolest move available. But then you’ll wake up and there’ll already be scones in the oven, she’s making sure everyone gets there in time, swaying a little to the music and it looks like she can’t possibly be getting anything done. Before you know it though, everyone’s there, R has engineered a fashionably late entrance—to her own house—and sits at the head of the table, grinning, leaning back, knowing something that you don’t, and tells you she might read it after all. From Slump Papa to Senator.

TOE TAGS

AF It’s 2048 and we do communism now. Alec has filled the post of KulturAnalystskie, quietly murmuring demands from his well appointed Berlin basement palace—commanding the staterun noise bands to choose more esoteric subject matter, reminding the citizenry that their mandatory non-monetized grant proposals are due next week. At 12pm Utopian Time, Alec seats himself at The Shopskie as the populace gathers around him, staring on in amazement as the well-dressed diplomat nervously shuttles between browsing tabs and sips espresso from a revolutionary mason jar. We wish him well on his latest edict, currently up for review by chief officers at the Center for Experimental Labor, that non-rave spaces enforce strict quiet hours from dawn to dusk.

JP At copy, last Wednesday, you designed page with gray clouds and black smoke (maybe it wasn’t really that—the point is that it was an obscure page.) We joked about how it represented the color of your soul. But that doesn’t make any sense to me. You see, when I was 7, my grandmother taught me how to guess the color of people’s souls. It’s a complicated process, but what but what matters is that right after I met you, I determined that your color was menta (It is also pretty likely that I chose that color because of the jacket you always wear.) If someone asked me to choose a place that reminded me of you, I would say the quiet green on a breezy, sunny day. I am choosing this place not only because I always see you there, sitting on the steps of the Haffenreffer museum, but because your presence has a similar healing quality. I also wrote you this brief poem en español <<Cuando Jamie se fue de Brown, con su botellita de cristal llena de agua, llovieron lagrimitas color menta del cielo.>>

The elevator dings and opens into his well-lit penthouse foyer. Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe hangs over his three-ton granite hall table. Frank thought I should have it. We shout, but the only response is a series of echoes. We step into the next room and see two hairless Sphynx cats slip around the corner. I like them because my neighbors avoid me when I take them out for a walk. We catch a glimpse through his plate-glass windows: there’s a nice view of downtown Manhattan from South Williamsburg. Who is he? Shane Taylor Potts. Where is he? We don’t know. We check our phones. Nothing since that text from half an hour ago. OMW. Make yourselves COMFY. It's hard. The whole place is stuffy from the ensconced humidifiers that run around the clock. It's for my skin. New text. Almost home! You breathe in a sigh of relief. Of comfort. Nothing's changed since the days when we’d make plans to wind down and eagerly await his arrival. You finish your homework, he should be leaving the gym soon. Every night, our place. We'd gingerly skip down the back stairs and throw the door wide open. He's here to hang, chill, light up maybe and watch a movie, finish a show, listen to a new album he found on SoundCloud because I've been on a SoundCloud kick. He's there, headphone in one ear, fleecy, with dimples rounding the corners of his smile. Home is where Shane is.

SS Everyone has secrets, locked away in the corner of their minds, hoping nobody will ever discover them. But what happens when someone finds the key? Spotted: SS, in a YSL pleated sweater, rag & bone trousers, and a pair of Margiela hybrid oxfords walking south on Benefit Street, (newly) bleached hair, espresso tonic in hand. Walk quickly S, we know your biggest, baddest secrets. 1. 2.

4. 5. 6.

The first time S ‘walked the dog’ was to his mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. S used to fall asleep on our floors all the time, now he’s the only reason we get out of bed sometimes. S has genuinely loved every movie, TV show, or song he has ever consumed— and he’s usually right. S is basically in grad school, but we’ve never seen him reading... Spotted: S at a dance party; Haven’t we seen those moves before on Boiler Room Paris? He found that Chanel coat you were dying to have. At half the price… what’s his secret? We hear S is a hotter goss than even we are, but word is, he can’t bring himself to hate on anyone...

You know we love you, XOXO

APRIL 21, 2017

FH Somewhere in the crags of New England, perhaps sitting atop a modest pile of shale, carefully picking up and breaking palm-sized slabs of the stuff into flakey pieces, Fatima thinks of a new pitch for an article. The wind grazes the crests of river water churning through the valley below. Snail mucin, Fatima muses as she presses her right index finger into a fresh, slimy snail trail, an exemplar of controversy in the natural skincare market. She pens final field notes, tightens her ponytail with a methodical graband-tug motion, and hikes toward Conmag to share her findings. So it goes with Fatima, week after week. She observes earthly patterns of all sorts, breaks them into soft, flakey pieces—pieces small enough to fully envelop with a close of the hand, yet weighty enough to remind you that you’re holding something. With care, she passes them to Indy readers who haven’t themselves spelunked the crevasses or scraped the crevices, eager to share the otherworldliness of our world.

To Our Scandinavian Prince: It’s morning inside a stone-caked bedroom. He’s in there but his head is inside a cloud. Full disclosure: for the first two months of our friendship, I was certain that you were not a student, but rather, a figment of my imagination. Brainwaves communicate with rain droplets, hail, snow crystals. You try to help de-haze, offer up a ‘morning, Charlie,’ but it’s no use. I found it impossible for someone to be so discerning, so ethereal, so cool. The blonde hair, pale skin, monochromatic fits. But somehow he makes it to the shower and the day starts to seem almost possible. His knowing this tends to happen in increments, getting to know him, also, happens in increments, just as one crumpled and seemingly dirty takeout napkin falls out of his pocket, and then another, and then a lot, you start to realize that these napkins are not gross and unusable, but in fact, perfectly equipped for blowing your nose into. When someone agrees with you on everything, it’s hard to think of the person not as an extension of your psyche. So the day starts to settle in, he might tell you about his dog, but be warned, it will make you feel shitty—you could never house that kind of love! Fast forward, living with you for three years, I am sure of your realness. We drink water from dinner plates when all of our dishes are dirty, you sleep with construction-grade earmuffs, your quirks are there, and make me love you even more. And Charlie answers back, eats sardines on saltines for breakfast with you, makes ripples in a bathtub out of the computer, runs a bath, runs a stop sign, calls his mom.

DO Fasten your seatbelts. We’re going on a road trip. Putting down her bag of salmon jerky, Dolma plugs in her Spotify playlist of 2025’s hottest wailing women and revs the engine. She ignores a phone call—unwise, because it might be the MacArthur Foundation trying to get in touch— but she’s too busy recollecting a warm childhood among the pines. She turns to you: Did you know that it was -60 degrees on prom night in Fairbanks? Did you know that the abstraction of death relies on the erasure of the individual and propagates a universalized ideal body? Dolma Ombadykow, PhD, does, and she’s happy to explain. We pass by a specialty kitchen supply store and make a quick stop, naturally. You try to convince Dolma out of buying a artisanal bread stone but she won’t have it. She’s going to make you a homemade loaf and you’re going to like it. Stepping back into her CRV, you realize that you don’t know where you are even going on this road trip. But not to worry, Dolma assures you, she knows the way. You’d follow her to the north slope of Alaska, or maybe just down the block to Coffee Exchange.

Some people appreciate a good croissant. Others appreciate a good croissant. And still fewer APrecIatÉ a GoOO0d Cròsšænt But note this! A dingy, beerstained birthday, the whiff of poppers under my noze. AL is afoot, and I’m glad. A kind soul, yes. A good listener, yes. 6’3? Perhaps. I’m glad to know you.

EB To paraphrase the late Patrice O’Neal, PF Elias is a legendary member of the Indy Here, at the end of her thirteenth and final(?) semester at staff. But by ‘legendary’ here I mean to Brown, we can look back on the Piper we’ve known with a say he’s like a myth, a fable. Sort of like fond grimace. She’s not the scrubby youth who, in primary the Yeti, we all kind of believe he exists, school, suffered dearly for rhyming with ‘diaper.’ but no one has ever seen him. Okay, fine, No longer is her science confined to a yurt. I’m kidding. Elias, a 7-foot redhead, is No—the Piper we know now is a true-Bru highly visible. You may have seen him activist: pro-halal, but not halal; willing to shopping that one Weinstein class eat that sandwich when it’s twelve days you took Sophomore year, or maybe leftover; devouring Fanon’s complete you’ve even caught a whiff of his works in the sun on her tropical vay-cay; golden toe socks, his legs dangling holding up a sign for Maine secession to well over the edge of your library hide the stack of French visas in her carrel. Most likely, however, front pocket. What was she really you’ve seen Elias showing off doing in Calais? Is that really red those spindly calves on the kickkombucha in her bottle, as she ball field, blasting repurposed strolls through the stacks? As dodgeballs deep into the if in answer, she bleachers, which is very emerges through a puff of cool and super imprestobacco smoke—feline, Leonard Cohen sive and don’t a-croon, her eye let anyone tell you glistening with the otherwise. Elias MCF hazy clarity of will be spending MCF has graduated. Not only has she her last his next semester graduated, but she’s also had a good Shavasana. in Brazil, seeking couple of years and—you know what— But you can’t asylum from she’s doing really really well, thank you see her eyes. the Brown for asking! She means this, sincerely. Sunglasses. Parking Police. No more cramped apartments, no more all-nighters, and definitely no more CAD models—she’s got interns. She’s got two cute dogs and one hunk, and she makes the hunk walk the dogs. She knows all the best restaurants, and they know where she likes to sit. She’s spending June, July and August on the beach, getting the tan that, let’s be honest, she’s never gonna lose. MCF is waking up. MCF is groggy and thinking about CAD models. MCF is waking up before you (ever) do. MCF doesn’t have any interns (yet). Suerte, chica.

SG In a tent-sized clove of garlic at the 2015 Oregon Country Fair, a small child moans into a voice modifier shaped like an ear: “I’m gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!” Enter garlic lover Stefania Gomez. “Same.” That day, she will square dance with a wizard, commune in a moon tent, and run into two different friends from Minnesota whom she hasn’t seen in years. Even at a festival of mossy dead-heads in the forest, she has roots. In the years since, as SG’s hair has gotten shorter, she’s nested in places you might not expect, from a movie theatre in Havana to a dining room above Captain Seaweed’s. Today, in her burnt-orange princess palace near Wickenden Street, you might find traces of certain secrets: a bloated notebook or a stray collage will offer evidence of things otherwise unspoken. She won’t tell you explicitly, for example, that her writing devastates, or that she spends all her time with her sweetheart and a weiner dog, or that she once got lost for several weeks in the Arctic Circle. But if you ask the right question, she might hang out with you sometime. Just make sure you bring a bag of Sour Patch Kids.

RS It’s a Friday night and the three of us are doing OK. There are some strong beats, bead-like glimmers radiate from the disco ball, unidentifiable jams. We’re watching Ruby’s arms, mimicking their patterns, watching her square-toed boots thump with intention. Then one of us wipes the sweat off her forehead, another takes a long blink, and all of the sudden, she’s gone. Our arms fall limp to our sides. Our feet are glued to the ground. We don’t know how to dance anymore! We don’t even know how to talk to each other! We collect our jackets, we leave the club. We take notice of a decapitated squirrel tail on the sidewalk outside as we depart, we wish we had remembered to wear gloves, red leather gloves. We take notice of a lonely slug inching across Benefit Street and we return it to its friends. We want to say hi to Nesmin in his cheesecloth outfit but it’s nighttime and the museum is closed. So we put on polka dot PJ pants, dream in olive greens and maroons, in tattoo doodles, in fragments of words. We mimic Ruby in all of these ways, so how come we still can’t dance?

TOE TAGS

REAL BLACK MAGIC Reclaiming Black indigenous spirituality Ruby Aiyo Gerber ILLUSTRATION BY Frans Van Hoek DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander BY

“I’m that Black a-Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba And my people come from Africa diaspora, Cuba. And you mix that Arawak, that original people. I’m that Black Native American, I vanquish all evil.” -Princess Nokia, Brujas Black Girl Magic is more than a prominent Black Twitter hashtag, popularized in 2013. It is a real and growing movement amongst young Black women and femmes. More and more Black women and femmes are reconnecting with witchcraft and spirituality as an anti-oppressive and anti-colonial act of resistance. Black witchcraft is used to connect women with the spiritual fire of the motherland. Slavery robbed enslaved people of their religion, but the Black witchcraft movement is restoring this connection. Femme saints in many African religions are powerful and present. Though Black people of all gender identities are returning to indigenous spirituality, this article is centered on the sub-section of Black women and femmes finding strength within this movement. +++ Given their historic struggles against oppression, many Black Americans have turned to religion as a spiritual crutch. White colonizers didn’t understand Black African spirituality, and as a result feared the religious practices of the people they enslaved. They banned the religions and suppressed the accompanying rituals and magic beliefs. Enslaved West Africans took the religion that was forced upon them and made it their own. As such, Christianity has occupied a huge space in Black life. In some Black Christian communities and churches, vestiges of West African religious practices are still perceptible. An example of this is the ring shout or circle dance, a ritual where worshippers gather in a circle while stopping their feet and clapping their hands. If a worshipper is overtaken by a spiritual urge, they might shout or fall into the center of the circle. This practice, first introduced into Christianity by enslaved West Africans in the West Indies and the US, is still employed by the Gullah people in Georgia and South Carolina. It continues to be used as a way to conjure spirits amongst the Black witches, who no longer have to practice in the shadows. For a long time, witchcraft in Western culture and media has been whitewashed. White witches such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Samantha from the 1960s TV show Bewitched have shaped how we view witchcraft. White witches are often viewed as forces of good, whimsical and mysterious. When African diasporic magic makes an appearance on the screen or in the media, though, it tends to be portrayed as dark, dangerous, and demonic. The practice of Voodoo has been a frequent target for media deformation, through which Blackness is associated with bad magic. For nearly a century, the Voodoo priest, called a Houngan, has been one of Hollywood’s favorite onscreen villains. In The Princess and the Frog, which starred Disney’s first Black princess, Tiana faces off against the dark forces, led by Voodoo Priest, Dr. Facilier.

OCCULT

African indigenous religions crossed the ocean along with enslaved people; the conjuring of spirits and healing magic were part of ancient traditions that were forced underground by fear of racist backlash in the New World. In the Americas, practitioners of these religions updated their traditions by taking elements of the old and applying them to the new and harsh environment of slavery. West Africans brought many different forms of religions to the New World, which colonialism obscures, erasing the diversity of identities and religions in West Africa—spiritual groups such as the Kongo, Yoruba, Islam, Igbo, Mande, and Wolof. In the New World, however, most spiritual rituals came from the Ifa Yoruba religion. These newer practices all shared a similar central framework of the Ifa practice, which worships Orishas (spirits), Egguns (ancestors), and nature. Examples of religions with African influences are Candomblé in Brazil, Santeria in Puerto Rico and Cuba, and Voudoun/Voodoo in Haiti and the US. Candomblé is practiced by the “povo do santo” (people of the saint). It developed out of Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu beliefs from West Africa, carried with the enslaved people imprisoned by the Portuguese. Enslaved Africans often hid their Gods behind the masks of Catholic saints, but continued to worship and resist the oppressive European colonists who attempted to break their wills and traditions as a form of control. +++ Today, a new generation is finding expression and power in old practices, reclaiming their past through exploration of magic and spirituality. “Calling myself a Black witch is to understand the political nature and the power that title holds for me—as a woman and as a witch and as someone taking ownership of her magic and her whole body,” Lakeesha Harris, a Black witch from New Orleans, told VICE. Harris, 41, is one of the new generation of Black witches. She comes from a long line of spiritual practitioners who have passed down African and Afro-American traditions generationally. She’s found that more and more young Black people—femmes in particular—are coming to her and asking to be reconnected with their spiritual roots. They feel as if they have been robbed of their identity and ancestral spiritual practices by the cruelty of slavery and colonialism. In response, Harris opened the doors to a new school called Black Witch University at the beginning of this year. There, Harris and her fellow Black witches take on seven students and teach them an assortment of African and Afro-American spiritual practices. She teaches the aspiring witches how to ground themselves in tradition, while fighting against the colonization of their bodies and their communities. Unlike other covens and organizations focusing on Black witchcraft, Black Witch University welcomes Black witches of all gender identities, and from varying occult paths. The tuition is $1,100, but financial accommodations are made for students who cannot afford it; these accommodations usually come out of Harris’ own pocket, a testament to her dedication to

passing on her knowledge to a new generation. Harriet’s Apothecary, a New York-based group, also fights against the oppression of Black femmes and people of color, but instead uses the technique of community healing. The group mixes African and Afro-American spiritual practices, treating trauma—both the present day wounds of racism and the scars left on Black communities from the vestiges of slavery. The collective utilizes root work, Rakhi, spiritual divinations, and much more. Groups such as this are attracting more Black women and femmes to look inward and to the past for strength and self-reformation. Returning to the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, social media has contributed to the growth of this new witch movement. Positive images of Black Witches supporting one another on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook attract young women and femmes to a movement that rejects and protects against white oppression. Black witches reclaim the Black spiritual history and celebrate the Black body. It remains to be seen where this movement will go, but it is an exciting development on the cultural and spiritual landscape. Black women and femmes are continuing the fight against the condemnation and erasure of African diasporic religions. RUBY AIYO GERBER B’20 with spells to dispel a duppy.

APRIL 21, 2017

SMALL TOWN SAINT Not much to see, but what you hear makes up for it

Eve Zelickson ILLUSTRATION BY Anzia Anderson DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander BY

The sky over Downtown Escanaba is the same color as the sidewalk: a perfect match, so that whether you walk with your head hung low or your chest lifted, the grainy grey floods your vision. It’s early, 7AM on a Thursday and most of the town in the upper peninsula of Michigan is still asleep. The bank hasn’t opened yet. The funeral home’s shades are drawn. City Hall is empty. There is a warm orange glow from the church windows, but no other indication that someone is inside. My Grandma finds the silence uncomfortable. She fills our steps with muddled stories of coal shootin’ Annie, a woman who—from what I have surmised—is a retired coal miner with bad personal hygiene, and stealin’ Diane, who stuffs scones from the church into her purse every Sunday. Grandma was born in the neighboring town of Gladstone, Michigan and like many residents, never wandered far. Grandma used to walk five miles a day, but now at 86, she’s whittled it down to three miles (except on Sundays, when she attends mass). Past Downtown, which is really one long street and several cramped diners, we enter the backcountry. Here, frozen red blueberry bushes circle towering evergreens. Grandma tells me about a neighbor named Irving Houle whom everyone called Francis. I’m listening with one ear, the other busy trying to trace the origin of a rustling tree or shrub or just a general direction. “Irving received the stigmata at 67 and experienced the passion of Christ every night.” “Wait, what did you just say?” When we return home, I Google Irving Houle. The first result is a website titled “Mystics of the Church,” that contains excerpts from the book A Man Called Francis written by Father Robert J. Fox, Houle’s spiritual counselor. Over half the page is comments from people sharing stories of Houle’s humility and healing power. Stigmata is the Catholic term that describes lesions or pain in locations that correspond to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. These wounds can be visible or invisible, permanent, periodic or temporary, and usually appear on the hands, feet, and forehead. A Greek term that translates to “mark” or “tattoo,” stigmata was first referenced in Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Galatians” in which he wrote, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.” Since Saint Paul’s first expression of the condition, hundreds of people have claimed to be stigmatics. While a reliable list does not exist, the Catholic Encyclopedia compiled an unofficial roster of 300 names. Approximately 30 of those listed are still alive. +++ By the time Grandma yells, “dinner is ready,” I’ve been on the computer two hours. I try to pry more information from Grandma over beef stroganoff and apple juice, but it’s clear she doesn’t want to engage. She steers the conversation toward the looming storm and how I’m in dire need of a haircut. After dinner I’m back on the web, on the hunt for answers. While the Catholic Church does not recognize every instance of stigmatism, it has affirmed its occurrence as a supernatural element of suffering for Jesus. According to the Catholic Education Resource Center, an online library for Catholic culture and faith, “the Church strives to first ascertain that the origin is not of natural causes, and looks for supernatural evidence to prove that the stigmata is truly a sign from God.” True stigmatics will bear wounds that bleed more profusely on Holy days and during Lent. The blood flow will not clot or produce infection. Their wounds will be untreatable and appear suddenly, usually on a religious day and almost always on devout practitioners. If you present as a genuine stigmatic, the Church will beatify and canonize you, maybe. St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968) is the most recent stigmatic to be officially recognized by the Church. Pope John Paul II sanctified Padre Pio in 2002. Records reveal that several 20th century physicians studied Padre Pio’s wounds but made no formal diagnosis.

METABOLICS

+++ I find Irving Houle’s normalcy painstakingly annoying. He lived his whole life in Escanaba, embodying it to the point that he became a projection of it; camouflage against Catholic churches and momand-pop businesses that still tinker along roadsides. After graduating from St. Joseph’s High School in 1944, Houle entered the army. He served two years before being honorably discharged in 1946. He worked at Escanaba’s leading employer, the water and oil pump manufacturer, Engineered Machine Products. He married Gail LaChapelle at St. Joseph’s Church in 1948 and raised five children with her. All normal for a Catholic raised in the Upper Peninsula. Soon, I become obsessive: I’m up late eating cold stroganoff and reading about his childhood, which seems equally ordinary except for an incident that took place when he was six years old. Houle fell off a work horse onto a railroad tie, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung. The doctor could not operate that night because of Houle’s severe hemorrhaging. The next morning the medical staff crowded Houle’s bed, amazed that his ribs were no longer puncturing the lung; the bleeding had stopped completely. Young Houle would later tell his mother that a glowing man stood over his bed all night at the hospital. Years later Father Fox explained, “it must have been Jesus.” Growing up, Houle sat through long Church services every Sunday and stayed after to recite the stations of the cross: three Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s at each station. His faith followed him into adulthood; he attended daily mass at St. Joseph’s and made the stations of the cross afterward. Elmie Dombrowski, Houle’s neighbor, told the Diocese of Marquette Newsletter that the Houles’ “were just an ordinary family, hard working and good people.” She recalled, “You’d see [Houle] in church all the time. I was sort of surprised when this happened to him, but why not him?” Houle didn’t seem to have an answer to this question either. In 1993, Jesus appeared to Houle during Lent at age 67. Houle recalls seeing blood pour profusely from Jesus’ hands; “I was sure that there would be blood on the floor, but there was not.” On Good Friday, Houle planned to stay at St. Joseph’s until midnight, but around 10:30PM sharp pains surged through his hands and he headed home. According to A Man Called Francis, Houle returned home that night and awoke the next morning with large red circles on his hands. From that day forward, his wounds bled every Friday, and moreso during Lent. In addition to his painful marks, Houle suffered the “passion of Christ” every night, what Father Fox describes as an embodiment of the crowning of thorns with intense moaning and pain accompanied by flailing arms. When Father Fox asked Houle if he experienced pain in his hands constantly, Houle replied, “No I don’t, but I feel my heartbeat in them all of the time. After midnight, that is when the pain starts. My side, my whole upper body pains; my head—just like someone clapped those thorns on my head... my whole upper body feels like it is being ripped apart and then my hands. Oh! My hands, Father. At times it is unbearable.” +++ I have a dream about Irving Houle. We sit in my Grandmother’s kitchen as I ask him questions that he won’t answer. I want to know what he sees when he experiences the passion of Christ each night. I want to know if he has any other medical conditions that could explain his wounds. He keeps saying, “I will not speak about my suffering.” I grow incredibly frustrated.

Stigmata is a physical phenomenon. If you believe in it, it is a manifestation of faith. If you don’t believe in it, it could mean something else entirely. The main non-faith based explanations seem to link it to “hysteria.” What does it say about faith if the stigmata are self-inflicted? Is it a form of piety? A symptom of mental illness? Whether it is supernatural or manmade, it is still inflicted onto the corporeal, earthly, mortal form in the name of some higher, spiritual power. +++ Houle told Father Fox, “Jesus did not tell me to speak, he simply said touch my people,” and Houle is said to have touched over 200,000 people at his healing services, long ceremonies that occur after mass. Once word of Houle’s stigmata spread, people travelled across the country to receive his prayers. YouTube clips show Houle placing scarred hands on wet-eyed believers, pulling them close, and whispering prayers to himself. I read a description of a woman who claims she was “slain in the spirit,” as Houle prayed over her, fainting immediately at his touch. The people of Escanaba refer to him as Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the first recorded person in Christian history to suffer from stigmata. I enjoy reading testimonies from people Houle healed. I find it oddly comforting. Terry Saunders, a state trooper with stage four lung cancer, recovered miraculously after praying with Houle for a month. Saunders told Our Sunday Visitor, a Roman Catholic newsletter, “every time Irving would see me, he would greet me and put his arm around me and his hand on my chest. Every time he did that, bolts of white heat would course through my chest. I could feel it immediately.” Many testimonies were people from Escanaba who wrote that Houle had healed their ailment, revived their faith, and brought them back to the Church. On Sunday, Grandma asks if I’ll go to Church with her. She never pressures me, but the guilt looms like a raincloud every time I politely decline. This Sunday I accept. We sit in the back pew. I wonder how many of Houle’s healing services took place after this mass? How many in the room had received his blessing? When Houle passed away in 2009 after months of failing health, the Church released an article describing a wake that lasted over four hours. People across the Upper Peninsula packed inside the church to pray with Irving one last time. On the drive home I ask Grandma if she believes Houle was a true stigmatic. She pauses, “I don’t know, but if he was or wasn’t, he sure offered the people of this town some comfort, some hope, and who am I to judge that.” +++ Who am I to judge that? I awake before the sun to get a head-start on the eight hour drive ahead of me. I pack up my belongings in a daze and hug my grandmother goodbye as she hands me a large Tupperware of stroganoff. Driving out of Escanaba, the trees look tall and winsome against the rising sun. I pass St. Joseph’s one last time, the palatial Roman columns, the wellgroomed shrubs, the warm orange glow from the window, a peaceful parish. EVE ZELICKSON B‘19 dreams often.

APRIL 21, 2017

Teddy Davey ILLUSTRATION BY Lillian Xie DESIGN BY Andrew Linder BY

Have you seen a bear, about yea-high, about yea-wide? Medium age, high density? This bear is named Braxton and she is the proud teddy bear of a Mrs. Douff, who would be much obliged to receive her teddy bear for a prize of two thousand dollars. Quoth Mrs. Douff:

WANTED: LARGE TEDDY

“Well, see, I was downtown the other day—or, rather, evening—looking to buy some incense. I use it to get in touch with my son, bless his soul, who died last year. He was a neurosurgeon, though. Bless his soul. The minute I purchased my weekly sniffs, I alighted to see the children playing by the fire hydrant. There was one little boy in particular who looked strikingly similar to my surgeon son, bless his soul, who died last year. It was a spitting image, really, and he had this teddy bear in his arms whose name I immediately knew: Braxton. I saw Braxton in his arms, and suddenly I was seized by transcendental knowledge. I could feel Braxton calling to me, saying, ‘Help me, Mommy. The boys don’t play nice with bears like me.’ “So I walked up to those boys and told them to leave my son alone. I leaned down to the one who looked like my son, and I pointed right at his nose, and I said, ‘Listen up, buddy boy. You and I both know you’re out to get my inheritance, and you’re not getting a cent of it. You’re dead, and your life insurance is mine!’ And I ripped the bear from his arms! Next thing I know, as I was shopping for garden pesticides, I noticed out the window that the police were inspecting my car. The police! “I asked the shopkeeper for a notepad and pen, and I wrote a simple note to them:

BEAR

Dear Police, I hope this isn’t terribly rude of me, but I believe you don’t have a warrant to inspect my belongings, namely today my car. My husband was a veteran in one of those wars that we did, and I would appreciate your respect for his death. Bless his soul—cancer’s a bitch, as I’m sure you know. I would appreciate you getting away from my belongings, as I feel this is harassment on the highest level, and I do believe that you are disturbing the peace (people in the shops are staring at you—more importantly, staring at my car. When I get into said car, what will people think? That I am the type of veteran’s widow to be harassed by government officials and the like? Will this affect my credit score?) What kind of state are we coming to, when officers of the Lord’s Land and Law decide to creep around an old veteran’s widow’s car? I thank you for your time, and for the donation of your souls to the state— Cordially, Sincerely, Etc. Mrs. D. “Of course, this was the perfect distraction, and as the shopkeeper confronted the officers with my note, I slipped into my car, grabbed the incense, amphetamines, and bong inside my trunk, paid the meter for the rest of the evening, and walked away. “Suffice to say that Braxton, my precious treasure, my one and only relative left alive besides that child who I’m sure is after my inheritance, is suddenly inexplicably missing, and his return will award anyone—except that child who I’m sure is after my inheritance—at least a couple thousand dollars. I would much appreciate publishing the whole of this account in the newspaper, as I’m sure it will arouse sympathy from those in our community who I am proud to call my fellow citizens. Thank you, Mama D.” If you have any useful information, please bring Braxton to the bus stop between Underwood and Harney Streets, and sit on the bench until you receive further instruction to receive your reward. Make sure the bear is in plain sight.

LITERARY

ARPIL 21, 2017

THE LIST

FRIDAY 4.21 New Urban Arts 20th Birthday Bash New Urban Arts (705 Westminster) 7pm $30 21+ to support your neighborhood high schoolers This fundraiser will include a silent auction of artworks made by NUA community members. Also, open bar :o Indy x Findy Party Finlandia Co-op 10pm $3-5, or however much you want to pay to keep your favorite publication afloat! (part of proceeds will also go to Black and Pink) Come dance with us as we celebrate our last issue of the semester! Everyone is invited! We are fun and nice and not mean! SATURDAY 4.22 Prison Labor: Teach-In and Art-Build Direct Action for Rights and Equality Learn about the history of prison labor with DARE! Bring t-shirts to print!

They’ll be making art and signs and stuff related to climate justice and sustainability. WEDNESDAY 4.26 Train Your Dog! Free Workshop Bristol Animal Shelter 6pm This guy named Eric Letendre wrote a book called The Deadly Dog Training Myth, and he’ll be giving pointers from the book here. The event is free but it’s stressed that it’s “for humans only,” which, idk why you’d go if there are no puppers to hang out with. Old Houses of Warwick Warwick Public Library 7pm Warwick historian Henry Brown will take you on a tour of Warwick’s oldest houses, including John Brown’s country estate, the birthplace of Nathanael Greene, and some other places that used to belong to old white dudes with similar names. Unclear whether this is a real-life tour or whether it’s all happening in the library, which is itself probably a kind of old building, I bet.

THURSDAY 4.27 Princess Nokia in Conversation Record Store Day 6:30pm What Cheer Records + Vintage Metcalf Auditorium (Brown U) This is probably happening at other record stores This is wild! Pre-spring weekend, Princess Nokia will be around Providence too, but this one is noteworthy talking about race, spirituality, and feminism in her artis’cause it’s What Cheer’s last Record Store Day--appar- tic process. Part of the Women’s History Series, sponsored ently they’re closing at the end of May! I don’t even by Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. really like What Cheer but Thayer Street is more trash than ever! Fuck gentrification! Fuck Chipotle and that I’m Shmacked Tour 257 hellmouth! Colosseum 9pm SUNDAY 4.23 No price listed except that it’s “free for ladies,” which, idk Food Truck Sunday Funday about you, but that really skeeves me out Hot Club Travelling film crew and party coordinator will bring 12pm their signature casual misogyny to Providence. I Free, but said food truck food is probably expensive :/ thought this was a TV show but it seems like it’s You’re invited to enjoy food and drinks at the “newly way weirder...like a youtube doucheexpanded” Hot Club. RIP Lola’s. Sigh. bag empire? This is not the world I want to live in. MONDAY 4.24 Let’s Talk About Immigration Jorge Alvarez High School 4pm Providence Student Union is hosting a discussion about immigration policies and Trump’s executive orders, with the chance to hear from an immigration lawyer. This event is for high school students only! TUESDAY 4.25 Climate Justice + Just Transition Art Build The FANG Collective (545 Pawtucket Avenue) 1pm-10pm Join the FANG Collective as they make art for RI Jobs with Justice’s upcoming May Day march and rally!